History's greatest fails

[Conserative Morality]

True, but the Romans were MUCH better at it!

Much better at squeezing every denarius out of a province? Yes. But at least the governors (Well, not the governors, but the Empire as a whole) gave them something out of it.

[Schwabenreich]

I was under the impression that Egyptians made use of gunpowder in their territory and potentially North Africa before the Christians were? Or did I just imagine that.

If the Egyptians were given gunpowder weapons they would have destroyed the Hittites entirely, occupied Anatolia, and also expanded as far south as Lake Victoria and ruled most of the surrounding lands of the Nile River.

IIRC the reason they didn't dominate with gunpowder was that while the mamluks used handcannons and large cannons as early as the mid 1200s (debatably), their level of gunpowder firearms was not devastatingly effective. I can only assume that the actual good innovations on firearms came to africa from europeans.

[Unilisia]

If the Egyptians were given gunpowder weapons they would have destroyed the Hittites entirely, occupied Anatolia, and also expanded as far south as Lake Victoria and ruled most of the surrounding lands of the Nile River.

IIRC the reason they didn't dominate with gunpowder was that while the mamluks used handcannons and large cannons as early as the mid 1200s (debatably), their level of gunpowder firearms was not devastatingly effective. I can only assume that the actual good innovations on firearms came to africa from europeans.

Ah you mean the Mamluks. Well, they got what they deserved. Never amounted to much anyway...

[Conserative Morality]

I'm talking Pharaoh times, before even the Osmans were around to make the Ottomans. If the Egyptians had been armed with gunpowder during the times before/during the Roman Era, things would have been immensely different.

Not really. Early gunpowder weapons weren't exactly renowned for penetrative power. Good at destroying forts and blowing through mail, sure, but I doubt small arms had enough penetrative power to eliminate

Furthermore, widespread use of gunpowder was only enabled by skilled pikemen backing them up. Without the integration of pikemen and gun-wielding soldiers into an army and the tactical considerations regarding them both (Which the Ptolemys didn't have - Greek tactics almost completely disregarded light infantry), gunpowder troops are glorified crossbowmen.

[Schwabenreich]

IIRC the reason they didn't dominate with gunpowder was that while the mamluks used handcannons and large cannons as early as the mid 1200s (debatably), their level of gunpowder firearms was not devastatingly effective. I can only assume that the actual good innovations on firearms came to africa from europeans.

Ah you mean the Mamluks. Well, they got what they deserved. Never amounted to much anyway...

Meh, I like them better then the other guys who've been in charged with Egypt, turkic slave warrior caste that took over a nation and became a regional power in their own right, whats not to like. Its taking the Ottoman Janissary up to eleven.

[Unilisia]

I'm talking Pharaoh times, before even the Osmans were around to make the Ottomans. If the Egyptians had been armed with gunpowder during the times before/during the Roman Era, things would have been immensely different.

Not really. Early gunpowder weapons weren't exactly renowned for penetrative power. Good at destroying forts and blowing through mail, sure, but I doubt small arms had enough penetrative power to eliminate

Furthermore, widespread use of gunpowder was only enabled by skilled pikemen backing them up. Without the integration of pikemen and gun-wielding soldiers into an army and the tactical considerations regarding them both (Which the Ptolemys didn't have - Greek tactics almost completely disregarded light infantry), gunpowder troops are glorified crossbowmen.

Egyptians with Greek fire before the Greeks had Greek fire...

[Nazis in Space]

And Europe has been exposed to American crops such as the potato and corn, both of which are very easy to farm and versatile crops.

Try farming them easily when you don't have a beast of burden. Even if you've them available, the differences are huge - a major advancement of the middle ages was to replace oxen with horses, which made working the fields ridiculously more efficient, and allowed for a remarkable increase in population.

Also, the Americans could have come up with european farming methods, or bred domesticated animals into good farming animals, they just didn't, the continents and climate have nothing to do with it.

You're the first person I've ever seen arguing that turkeys make perfectly decent beasts of burden.

[Conserative Morality]

Egyptians with Greek fire before the Greeks had Greek fire...

Greek fire was a devastating Naval weapon, but less than a game changer on land.

[Ecans]

True, but the Romans were MUCH better at it!

Much better at squeezing every denarius out of a province? Yes. But at least the governors (Well, not the governors, but the Empire as a whole) gave them something out of it.

Yep, and let them keep their religions too. Well, except for the Druids nasty habit of chopping people in half to see the future.

[Schwabenreich]

Not really. Early gunpowder weapons weren't exactly renowned for penetrative power. Good at destroying forts and blowing through mail, sure, but I doubt small arms had enough penetrative power to eliminate

Furthermore, widespread use of gunpowder was only enabled by skilled pikemen backing them up. Without the integration of pikemen and gun-wielding soldiers into an army and the tactical considerations regarding them both (Which the Ptolemys didn't have - Greek tactics almost completely disregarded light infantry), gunpowder troops are glorified crossbowmen.

Egyptians with Greek fire before the Greeks had Greek fire...

So its like spanish with french toast before the french had french toast? Or that belgiums had fries before the french had fries (or the somewhat controversial, Vlaams having frieten before Walloons had fries)? I don't know about the egypts having greek fire before greeks having greek fire but I know names can be deceptive.

[The Anglo-Saxon Empire]

What? Lots of good came out of WW2 in the areas of military strategy (combined arms and maneuver warfare)

Extant since the invention of spears, cavalry, and bow & arrow.

Not really, combined arms warfare combines things like artillery, tanks, and infantry in complete cohesion, the tankers don't charge forward without infantry support, the artillery doesn't sit right behind the artillery, everything directly supports everything else. The infantry protect tanks from infantry, the tanks protect the infantry from vehicles and provide cover, the artillery protects tanks and infantry from dug in forces, and clusters of enemies. In ancient warfare an army may have had spears, bows, and cavalry, but the cavalry didn't charge with infantry right next to them, the archers weren't having the infantry tell them what to shoot.

technology (rocketry, jet engines, nuclear fission)

~ 1000 A.D.; pre-WW2 by a couple months; pre-WW2 by a couple months.

What? None of that technology existed in 1000 AD, and both of those weren't developed in any depth until WW2. The first massed produced jet planes came out towards the end of WW2, the first man made object in space was a V2 rocket, the first nuclear bomb wasn't detonated until late in WW2.

military technology (anti-ship missiles, HEAT munitions, APDS munitions)

See rocketry; Pre-WW2 by a decade; valid

Rocket engine =/= AShM. The Fritz X bomb was actually guided, and designed with the intention of specifically killing ships. Also, Germany didn't use HEAT in its guns until 1940, the bazooka wasn't invented until 1942, the Panzerfaust wasn't invented until 1943.

it dragged America out of its isolation, and permanently changed the political landscape of Europe.

What kept America out of its isolationism in the post-war era was the cold war; Pre-war, America's colonial possessions and economic interests had ended american isolationism in the early 19th century. The changes to the political landscape of Europe (Expansion of the Soviet Union, iron curtain) were not a favourable outcome.

America was forced out of its isolation thanks to WW2, it stayed out of its isolation because it had more to gain by staying involved in the world. It had to rebuild Europe and Asia, it had to help protect nations from communism such as China. Also, do you have any proof that the US would have just gone back to being isolationist even without communism? Also, WW2 killed off fascism in Europe for the most part and stabilized the continent, even if it was divided there wasn't another world war in 20 years, there wasn't another Crimean war or Napoleonic war, there wasn't another 7 years war or war of Spanish succession.

The best description of WW2 I've ever seen, echoing the sentiments of Nazi Flower Power, is 'Both sides tried their hardest to lose, and the Germans gave that little extra bit of effort.'

What? Every nation pretty much did everything in their power, Russia lost 20 million people, Germany lost much of its male population, Britain was willing to light its coast on fire to fight a German invasion, and all of this is just 20 years after another war that killed tens of millions of men.

[The Archregimancy]

Either that or Alexander III of Macedon not naming a specific heir, that was truly retardation on an epic scale.

I actually facepalmed the first time I ever read that

A) Gods don't expect to die at the age of 32

B) He _did_ have an heir; two of them. Macedon was a hereditary monarchy that largely followed the principle of primogeniture.

Unfortunately, one heir was a literal idiot, and the other hadn't been born yet.

Alexander's half-brother Philip III was quite literally retarded (though on a mild, rather than epic, scale); but he was still taken on campaign, and was immediately declared King of Macedon on his elder brother's death while the generals waited to see if the pregnant Roxana gave birth to a son - which she did. He was then used as a puppet by various factions; he was never mentally competent to rule in his own right. Alexander's direct heir, his son Alexander IV, was born posthumously; unfortunately, having a minor on the throne of a recently conquered world empire wasn't a recipe for stability, and Alexander was poisoned at the age of 13 shortly after his regents tried to declare his ability to rule in his own right as the Diadochi squabbled over who would rule what part of Alexander's empire.

The problem wasn't Alexander's failure to name an heir: the problem was the absence of a mentally competent adult heir of the Argead royal dynasty.

[Ecans]

Extant since the invention of spears, cavalry, and bow & arrow.

Not really, combined arms warfare combines things like artillery, tanks, and infantry in complete cohesion, the tankers don't charge forward without infantry support, the artillery doesn't sit right behind the artillery, everything directly supports everything else. The infantry protect tanks from infantry, the tanks protect the infantry from vehicles and provide cover, the artillery protects tanks and infantry from dug in forces, and clusters of enemies. In ancient warfare an army may have had spears, bows, and cavalry, but the cavalry didn't charge with infantry right next to them, the archers weren't having the infantry tell them what to shoot.

~ 1000 A.D.; pre-WW2 by a couple months; pre-WW2 by a couple months.

What? None of that technology existed in 1000 AD, and both of those weren't developed in any depth until WW2. The first massed produced jet planes came out towards the end of WW2, the first man made object in space was a V2 rocket, the first nuclear bomb wasn't detonated until late in WW2.

See rocketry; Pre-WW2 by a decade; valid

Rocket engine =/= AShM. The Fritz X bomb was actually guided, and designed with the intention of specifically killing ships. Also, Germany didn't use HEAT in its guns until 1940, the bazooka wasn't invented until 1942, the Panzerfaust wasn't invented until 1943.

What kept America out of its isolationism in the post-war era was the cold war; Pre-war, America's colonial possessions and economic interests had ended american isolationism in the early 19th century. The changes to the political landscape of Europe (Expansion of the Soviet Union, iron curtain) were not a favourable outcome.

America was forced out of its isolation thanks to WW2, it stayed out of its isolation because it had more to gain by staying involved in the world. It had to rebuild Europe and Asia, it had to help protect nations from communism such as China. Also, do you have any proof that the US would have just gone back to being isolationist even without communism? Also, WW2 killed off fascism in Europe for the most part and stabilized the continent, even if it was divided there wasn't another world war in 20 years, there wasn't another Crimean war or Napoleonic war, there wasn't another 7 years war or war of Spanish succession.

The best description of WW2 I've ever seen, echoing the sentiments of Nazi Flower Power, is 'Both sides tried their hardest to lose, and the Germans gave that little extra bit of effort.'

What? Every nation pretty much did everything in their power, Russia lost 20 million people, Germany lost much of its male population, Britain was willing to light its coast on fire to fight a German invasion, and all of this is just 20 years after another war that killed tens of millions of men.

Exactly. Even a small nation like Canada (with a population of about 7% of the combined populations of Britain and the US) did roughly 20% of the heavy lifting on D-day and the push through Europe. The sacrifice was huge. They emphatically were not trying to lose.

[Buffett and Colbert]

Gunpowder is only proximate, though. The ultimate cause would be the reason gunpowder landed in the hands of the Europeans first and not the Africans.

And what reason would that be?

Wait a minute... Did you just finish reading Guns, Germs, and Steel?

I thought you already knew that.

EDIT-- The reason being the spread of agriculture, etc. to Europe from the Fertile Crescent, leading to the rise of cities and cities/civilizations, yaddah, yaddah.

[Conserative Morality]

I thought you already knew that.

Don't get me wrong, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a great book, but it's hardly all-encompassing (As it's author admits, to his credit, that a thousand or so pages cannot possibly cover every instance he wishes to).

[Dododecapod]

Greatest Fail? I would say the Spanish Empire.
That may sound strange, considering it's breadth and length of existence. But unlike the other Great Empires, the Spanish was built on a basically unstable foundation - specifically, plunder and pillage of the wealth of the Americas. At it's height hundreds of tons of Gold, Silver, Gemstones and other hard wealth were flowing across the Atlantic ocean to Spain every year.
Nothing too strange about that, all of the colonial powers harvested the wealth of their colonial possessions to build their empires. However, the British, Dutch, Portuguese - all of these used that wealth to build infrastructure and increase their power and wealth in tangible and permanent ways. Spain spent it's wealth on fruitless wars of conquest and dominance in Europe, on ever more repressive actions against the native peoples and imported slaves in it's colonies, and, most importantly, on the aggrandizement and enwealthing of it's own populace.
At the height of it's empire, Spain had basically eliminated it's own lower class. EVERY Spaniard considered himself a Caballero, and even if poor, saw wealth and power as their birthright. The actual work was done with guest labourers from France, Italy or Germany, or slaves, though the slave population in Spain itself was never overly large (particularly compared to some of their colonies, which imported slaves by the shipload).
When the flow of plundered treasure slowed, and then stopped, Spain had nothing to show for it. The guest workers went home, and the Spanish no longer knew how to run their own country. They started having to import food for the first time, further paupering the treasury, and the Spanish Nation went into default not once, but three times.
To historians, this is called the "Spanish Lesson" - wealth can be wonderful, but be careful what you do with it.

[Nanatsu no Tsuki]

Greatest Fail? I would say the Spanish Empire.
That may sound strange, considering it's breadth and length of existence. But unlike the other Great Empires, the Spanish was built on a basically unstable foundation - specifically, plunder and pillage of the wealth of the Americas. At it's height hundreds of tons of Gold, Silver, Gemstones and other hard wealth were flowing across the Atlantic ocean to Spain every year.
Nothing too strange about that, all of the colonial powers harvested the wealth of their colonial possessions to build their empires. However, the British, Dutch, Portuguese - all of these used that wealth to build infrastructure and increase their power and wealth in tangible and permanent ways. Spain spent it's wealth on fruitless wars of conquest and dominance in Europe, on ever more repressive actions against the native peoples and imported slaves in it's colonies, and, most importantly, on the aggrandizement and enwealthing of it's own populace.
At the height of it's empire, Spain had basically eliminated it's own lower class. EVERY Spaniard considered himself a Caballero, and even if poor, saw wealth and power as their birthright. The actual work was done with guest labourers from France, Italy or Germany, or slaves, though the slave population in Spain itself was never overly large (particularly compared to some of their colonies, which imported slaves by the shipload).
When the flow of plundered treasure slowed, and then stopped, Spain had nothing to show for it. The guest workers went home, and the Spanish no longer knew how to run their own country. They started having to import food for the first time, further paupering the treasury, and the Spanish Nation went into default not once, but three times.
To historians, this is called the "Spanish Lesson" - wealth can be wonderful, but be careful what you do with it.

I hate to admit it but you're right. And several historians agree. the foundation of the Spanish Empire was weak. Pillaging and plundering doesn't make a stable empire. At least not for long.

[Buffett and Colbert]

I thought you already knew that.

Don't get me wrong, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a great book, but it's hardly all-encompassing (As it's author admits, to his credit, that a thousand or so pages cannot possibly cover every instance he wishes to).

Didn't say it was all encompassing. There are thousands of reasons that explain why the world is where it's at. Some of them are in Diamond's book, and
some of the one's in it are probably wrong. But I only posted in the thread to give really "old" answer since I assumed most did not go very far back in history.

What's the opposite of "Get offa mah lawn?"

[Conserative Morality]

EDIT-- The reason being the spread of agriculture, etc. to Europe from the Fertile Crescent, leading to the rise of cities and cities/civilizations, yaddah, yaddah.

But cities and civilizations were already existent in many African cultures... And in some cases, more advanced than European ones.

[Conserative Morality]

Didn't say it was all encompassing. There are thousands of reasons that explain why the world is where it's at. Some of them are in Diamond's book, and
some of the one's in it are probably wrong. But I only posted in the thread to give really "old" answer since I assumed most did not go very far back in history.

What's the opposite of "Get offa mah lawn?"

Turn up your hearing aid, old man?

[Buffett and Colbert]

Didn't say it was all encompassing. There are thousands of reasons that explain why the world is where it's at. Some of them are in Diamond's book, and
some of the one's in it are probably wrong. But I only posted in the thread to give really "old" answer since I assumed most did not go very far back in history.

What's the opposite of "Get offa mah lawn?"

Turn up your hearing aid, old man?

Turn up your hearing aid, old man. I don't need to listen to your stupid stories.

[Octabrinaland]

The French in World War One. Fighting in Blue Uniforms when everyone else was camouflage.

Almost nobody had camo during WWI. A few sniper units used it, but that was about it. A lot of commanders thought it would encourage 'cowardice' in the average soldier.
And, really, in trench warfare, all of your coats are going to end up being brown anyway, so why worry about what color they were to start with?

Well, the camouflage bit was overlooked - but, the French still wore blue uniforms in battle. Which is a bit of tactical advantage for the enemy.

[Nazis in Space]

Not really, combined arms warfare combines things like artillery, tanks, and infantry in complete cohesion, the tankers don't charge forward without infantry support, the artillery doesn't sit right behind the artillery, everything directly supports everything else. The infantry protect tanks from infantry, the tanks protect the infantry from vehicles and provide cover, the artillery protects tanks and infantry from dug in forces, and clusters of enemies. In ancient warfare an army may have had spears, bows, and cavalry, but the cavalry didn't charge with infantry right next to them, the archers weren't having the infantry tell them what to shoot.

The point is that different types of soldiers are present and used according to their specialities, depending on the situation. Even if using a rather more narrow definition than that, you get the shot & pike formations of the 16th century. And even if only looking at motorised warfare, you get WW1, not WW2.

What? None of that technology existed in 1000 AD, and both of those weren't developed in any depth until WW2. The first massed produced jet planes came out towards the end of WW2, the first man made object in space was a V2 rocket, the first nuclear bomb wasn't detonated until late in WW2.

Rocketry very much did, I'm afraid - and it was use plenty. You really should know better, considering that England used rockets to set Kopenhagen on fire during the Napoleonic wars. The first jetplanes did - again - appear before the war (Since when does 'Mass Produced' mean 'First?'), and were based on decades of research that, not very surprisingly, predated the war. Indeed, it has justifiably been argued that the war slowed down the development of aircraft technology, since getting as many planes as possible into the air as quickly as possible was more important than making them especially shiny.

Fission may be the only exception to this, considering how rushed the entire development was, but it, too, benefitted from a hell of a lot of preceding work (The great advances in the understanding of physics occuring between circa 1895 & 1935), and saying that the bomb was anything more than a mildly rushed end result of decades worth of research during peacetime is ridiculous.

Rocket engine =/= AShM. The Fritz X bomb was actually guided, and designed with the intention of specifically killing ships. Also, Germany didn't use HEAT in its guns until 1940, the bazooka wasn't invented until 1942, the Panzerfaust wasn't invented until 1943.

It was still jet-powered (Okay, so this belongs to jet engine, not rocketry), and guided by way of, uh, Radio... So its origins lie in the advent of wireless telegraphy, circa late 19th century? With WW2 involving nothing more than some kitbashing to use a half-century old technology in new ways? My, how impressive.

Essentially the same applies to shaped charges, of course, the principle behind which was foudn in the late 19th century, and the practical application being developed in the 1930s. Again, the war didn't see the development of the final product. Only the actual use thereof.

America was forced out of its isolation thanks to WW2, it stayed out of its isolation because it had more to gain by staying involved in the world. It had to rebuild Europe and Asia, it had to help protect nations from communism such as China. Also, do you have any proof that the US would have just gone back to being isolationist even without communism? Also, WW2 killed off fascism in Europe for the most part and stabilized the continent, even if it was divided there wasn't another world war in 20 years, there wasn't another Crimean war or Napoleonic war, there wasn't another 7 years war or war of Spanish succession.

Again, you're assuming that America was ever truly isolationist - this just plain isn't true. It engaged in interventions way back in the early 19th century, it happily declared wars on European powers int he same time period, it consistently interfered in Latin American business since the 19th century, it happily acquired a colonial empire in the second half of the 19th century, it happily participated in the Asian shenanigans of the second half of the 19th century...

The only thing that really changed after WW2 was that America realised that in the age of nukes and high-speed air forces and tanks, it couldn't scale back its military quite as much as it used to.

What? Every nation pretty much did everything in their power, Russia lost 20 million people, Germany lost much of its male population, Britain was willing to light its coast on fire to fight a German invasion, and all of this is just 20 years after another war that killed tens of millions of men.

This is kind of evidence concerning how hard they tried to lose, don't you think? Both sides were inclined to make as many mistakes as possible, to lose as many men as they possibly could, to fuck up wherever possible to bring about their own defeat in ten seconds flat.

And in the end, Germany gave that little bit of extra effort to make it true, outdoing the allies for incompetence (Albeit only by a small margin).

[Conserative Morality]

Turn up your hearing aid, old man. I don't need to listen to your stupid stories.

BACK IN MY DAY SON-

WHAT'S THAT? SPEAK UP SON!

[New Orcrimmar]

Operation Market Garden